


Cinema Snaccs

by lightweightix



Category: The Good Place (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, I made an account just to post this trash, I'm supposed to be managing my student loan repayment plan right now, Out of Character, but instead I am held prisoner by the chaos of mine own psyche, does it make me a stuck-up asshole if Tahani was easier for me to write than Eleanor, fork this is so bad but I Did It Anyway, honest to god nobody touch me I haven't written anything creative in literal years, no betas we die like men, post-s4e01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-28
Updated: 2019-09-28
Packaged: 2020-10-29 19:15:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20801576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lightweightix/pseuds/lightweightix
Summary: Eleanor Shellstrop is not stupid, but she’s playing a stupid role in a stupid game, and what she wouldn’t give to get out. What she wouldn’t give to be—to be not here.---I shirt this out in a post-premiere haze, because I had a few reservations on Chaotic Neutral!Simone. I mean, I get why she's doing what she's doing, but also, like, I dunno, I wake up from dreams feeling bad if I left anyone there in a rough spot. I'm aware they aren't real, but I feel like a bad person treating even imaginary friends poorly.





	Cinema Snaccs

Eleanor flicks another piece of popcorn into the river, watching an outrageously picturesque duck swim over to eat it. _D__o__ ducks eat at nighttime? It __doesn't__ matter._ She knows that Janet’s taken the utmost care with the entire Neighbourhood, and anything good enough for Janet is by far in excess of her own standards.

She doesn’t want to be out at this hour. This hour is all dark skies and twinkling stars, with the world here on the ground lit softly by the warm glow of flower-adorned streetlamps and shuttered apartment windows, accompanied by the inexplicable luminescence that seems to suffuse the very fabric of the Fake Good Place. This hour is a little too close for her tastes, too reflective and kind and _open_, and it makes her think about another night by the water in another lifetime—_deathtime? It d__oes__n’t matter._

Another night in another time. Better company, too.

_Shut up. Shut up, you’re being an idiot. _ _It doesn’t matter._

It does matter, clearly, but if she admitted that, she might cry into her popcorn, and if she were to sit by the river and cry into her popcorn, she might look questionable as the picture of authority here, and if she looked questionable as the picture of authority here, the _test subjects_ in this stupid,_ stupid_ Fake Good Place might realize that she’s actually a stupid, _stupid_ Fake Architect—

Not to say that _she’s_ stupid. Eleanor Shellstrop is not stupid, but she’s playing a stupid role in a stupid game, and what she wouldn’t give to get out. What she wouldn’t give to be—to be not here.

Yes, not here. Not doing this. Maybe somewhere else, doing something else. God, maybe _someone_ else.

She can’t. Couldn’t. Wouldn’t be able to. Not someone else, or at least not anyone else.

She doesn’t admit this.

She’s avoiding so many people right now. Avoiding Jason, avoiding Tahani, avoiding Michael—she’s sure he could find her, but she’s hoping he won’t—avoiding Simone, John, and _forking Chidi_—

The first three she doesn’t have to, though she wants to. The next two she has to—has to while she looks like this, _miserable_ and _pathetic_ and not-crying-but-maybe-crying—and definitely wants to right now, even though she knows that’s selfish, and she shouldn’t be doing that right now but _let her have this_. The last one, she—has to. She has to avoid him right now, can’t be near him without his own ghost holding her like a vise, the echo of a forgotten man in the voice of a dead one.

The echoes are just hers. They’re him, but they belong to her. There’s no one else to keep them now that he’s gone. Here, a mile away—she knows exactly where his apartment is—but gone.

She needs to get up.

When she does, brushing off another pantsuit, one of an almost cartoonishly large closet Michael gifted her stocked full of them, she hears it: a whoop and holler, both suspiciously hoarse from a throat that had probably earlier been stuffed with butter knives.

She’s right—of course she is, because she’s the brain of the group with the Professor gone, and, honestly, even with him there—and it’s Simone, a few hundred feet away and atop the light-ephant, the latter of whom is clearly distressed and bucking hard, though Simone just shouts again, then doubles down by scrambling to grab its flailing trunk.

_I’_ _m_ _ not drunk enough for this shirt._

But she’s the Architect—_welcome!_—so she rushes over, leaving her bucket of popcorn by the riverside. She’s holding her hands out like it’s going to do anything. _Why do p__eople__ do that? What the hell are we trying to catch?_

“Simone!” she half-yelps, before remembering herself and trying to regain her composure. “Simone, I—please, there are...many animals willing to be ridden here. Janet can summon one for you right now, if you want”—to Eleanor’s credit, she doesn’t flinch, even knowing how thinly stretched her friend is right now—“and I promise that it’ll be much more comfortable than _barebacking a baby elephant_. You can have a—a custom saddle! A saddle with cupholders. A saddle with a hotspot, even.” The last is frankly only kind of appealing, because the internet of the afterlife never updates. They can only access what was already out there at their time of death. How the Judge has access to new shows she can only guess.

Maybe there is real internet in the afterlife. Just in, you know, the real Good Place.

This sucks.

“Nah, I’m good up here,” Simone says loudly, beaming brightly even as her head whips backwards on a stronger buck. The light-ephant is trying to trumpet for help, but it comes out as an almost-fart with the way Simone is cutting off its air flow.

“I just have something to tell you!” Eleanor doesn’t have anything to tell her. “And I would really appreciate if I could do it with a little less commotion?” She would really appreciate a margarita, actually.

“Okay!” And with that, Simone lets go and tumbles off the light-ephant as it finally manages a blast out of its trunk before stampeding away, audibly crying in a disturbingly childlike voice. “You know, it’s amazing,” she says, hopping back up from the ground. “Nothing hurts here! I mean, there’s no reason for it to, since this isn’t really my body”—she gestures to her general physicality without breaking eye contact, and, despite the situation, Eleanor has to refocus and remind herself not to stare—“but it’s amazing! I didn’t even have to spit up those knives, you know? They just tasted bad. Well, not bad, but metal, you know?”

Eleanor opens her mouth even though she’s not at all sure she knows, but Simone continues, “So! What’d you want to tell me? Oooh, is it a favourite song? Oh, or a repressed memory! That would be fun. Wh—“

“Would you mind joining me for a bit, actually?” Eleanor shouldn’t be cutting off her residents, probably. It doesn’t matter. “I was thinking we could do a walk and talk.”

“Sure! I need to pass the time somehow, I guess.”

“...All right.” And then they walk back the way Eleanor came. Maybe she shouldn’t be walking back there, because a stray bucket of popcorn in supposed paradise might fuel Simone’s denial. Well, it would look strange to suddenly turn back now. To the popcorn, then, instead of past it. Better to act as though it’s intentional than a glitch in the matrix—more of Simone’s tin-hat proof that this isn’t real.

They don’t walk in silence, because Simone is singing to herself again, and Eleanor would stop her if she wasn’t thinking a million miles a minute about the conversation she asked Simone out of her impromptu rodeo for, the one that she has to make up _right now._

...Oh. She doesn’t have to make it up, actually. Because she’s already had it.

Eleanor beckons a still-singing, still-grinning, and somehow glittered Simone over to the popcorn, and sculpts her face into something more...down, which isn’t hard. Not that she’s admitting that. She’s not.

“I was here earlier, before I saw you...heading over. Feed the ducks with me?” Eleanor asks, pushing the waxed paper bucket to the other woman. Simone unceremoniously shoves a hand in much, much deeper than necessary, then launches the emerging fistful of popcorn, some landing in the river and more arcing directly upwards before showering down around them, mostly bouncing and sliding off Eleanor’s meticulously kept Architect’s bob but catching in Simone’s curls, though she pays it no mind as it does. It’s almost cute, but it’s also a sort of toddler-esque look, and Eleanor doesn’t need any other reminders of what glorified babysitters she and the rest of the (_remaining_, she thinks, unbidden) Soul Squad have become in the last few days.

She decides to take the initiative on the conversation. This is going to go the way she forking wants it to.

_Something has to._

“This is my first Neighbourhood.” She looks over, and Simone’s eyes are glinting with what must be amusement, curious with what mythos her brain has cooked up for this extended game of pretend. Eleanor looks away again, eyes trained instead on the river ducks, carefree and drifting along with the current before paddling back up and drifting again.

“I’ve never had to run one of these before.” Eleanor purses her lips, then backtracks a little over her slip. “It’s a privilege, of course, to be an Architect, and to get to do this, but this is my very first one. And I knew there would be some challenges, but I guess I didn’t think they would be this—this hard.” She lapses into a brief silence, and she can hear Simone to her left, absently chewing on some popcorn. She doesn’t interrupt, though.

“I had a lot of plans for this year. Everyone’s first year here, in paradise. Honestly, it’s already off track. And I don’t know if it’ll get back on. I’m”—she sucks in a deep breath—“worried it won’t.

“I wouldn’t normally admit this. I’m not supposed to. But I’m willing to”—_because you were one of my best friends_—“because you know what? It doesn’t matter. Because you don’ t think any of this is real, and I don’t think I can convince you. It doesn’t matter to you that this—that any of this—” Eleanor takes a shuddering breath, and leans forward, hiding her hands in the lush, just-this-side-of-but-still-tastefully-overgrown grass so that she can dig her fingers into the earth without drawing Simone’s eye.

_You will never live it down if you lose your shirt right now. Crying’s for suckers. Eleanor Shellstrop is not a sucker. _Eleanor Shellstrop has a burning in her nose and pressure behind her eyes. _I’m the opposite of a sucker. I’m a__—__blower? Blowhard. For fork’s sake, they’re all euphemisms__—_

The soil is cool under her nails.

“It doesn’t matter to you at all, you know? I could cry in front of you right now about how nothing is going according to plan, and you would look at me and laugh, because you don’t think I’m real. So you don’t think I’m really upset. You don’t care—” _and none of this matters._

Eleanor doesn’t realize that she’s said that last bit out loud until she realizes that Simone has gone completely quiet next to her, no obscenely noisy munching to be heard. There’s a beat where she silently curses her unfairly gorgeous but currently _batshirt insane_ friend for wandering off in the middle of Eleanor’s pathetic little soliloquy, and then another where she decides it’s for the best.

She freezes up when she feels a hand on her arm. It’s a warm hand—warm enough to feel through her suit jacket and dress shirt. When she finally looks up, her face schooled again but throat tight, she sees, for the first time in what feels like an eternity, a solemn Simone, and her facade almost cracks. It doesn’t, but it doesn’t have to, because _Simone is really perceptive_, her echo reminds her.

“You’re right,” Simone says at last. “I don’t think this is real. I think this is a made-up fantasy land full of made-up fantasy people.” _Thanks, babe, but I had that __one __figured out __already__._ “But I think I’m still real here, and my real self feels really bad about this. I don’t know why I dreamt up a guilt trip, because I was hoping I could have a good time before my brain permanently shuts down, but...” The wind tonight is warm, but Eleanor still feels a drop in temperature.

“Okay,” Simone says, squeezing Eleanor’s arm before dropping it.

“Okay what?” Eleanor says, voice carefully clear but vision blurrier than she cares to admit.

“Okay,” Simone says again. “I’ll tone it down. You’re very pretty, I have to say. It’d be a shame if I made someone so adorable so sad for all the time I have left. Even if the pretty woman is a fake angel I’ve conjured from the depths of my remaining subconscious.”

Eleanor clutches Simone’s arm for a second before kicking her hesitation to the wayside. _Fork it_, and she leans over to hug Simone, tighter than people who have known each other for two days should. Tighter than an ever-living Architect should hold a mortal resident. And Simone, sure enough, wraps her arms around Eleanor, squeezing furiously. It’s a disappointment instead of a relief. She knows Simone still thinks she’s a figment of her imagination, because she knows Simone, and Simone wouldn’t hug a stranger this hard, but she might if she thought they weren’t a stranger—she might if she thought she was soothing a manifestation of her own unruly anxieties.

Eleanor needs to see some of her real friends. That is, some of her friends who know she’s real. And maybe she needs a real hug.

* * *

“Hello? My, if anyone’s come to visit, do come in!”

Tahani sounds too chipper for this time of night, but Eleanor sees her deflate as soon as she steps through the doors to her friend’s palace, the socialite’s shoulders slumping as much as they ever do—which is to say the barest fraction of an inch, or five metres, or whatever it is.

“Oh, Eleanor, thank goodness it’s you. John has developed the _worst_ habit of—” Tahani stops and frowns as soon as Eleanor steps into the shine of her entrance hall’s main chandelier. The light in here is meant to be generous rather than cruel, meant to offer a gentle assistance in atmosphere and throw the appearance of those beneath it under a kinder lens, but Eleanor’s expression still leans harsh, and her eyes hollow. Her skin is duller than usual, even under the reflection of all the gold surrounding her, and Tahani breaks her un-criticizable pose at the top of the stairs to hasten—in as dignified a manner as possible—downwards.

“Darling, what is it?” she asks, swooping towards her favourite _américaine_. “What’s happened?”

When Eleanor makes to step forward, it’s with the corners of her mouth tugging down and her arms hovering awkwardly. “I thought I would cash in on that embrace,” she announces, defiant in tone, but Tahani knows better. She knows enough, at least.

When she leans down to wrap her diminutive friend in her arms, Eleanor holds her like a lifeline, burying her face into her shoulder, and Tahani elects to ignore what feels suspiciously like moisture on what is, frankly, a very delicate fabric. It doesn’t matter, anyway. Here, she can have any number of this same dress, but there is truly only one Eleanor.

And if Eleanor’s hair smells suspiciously like what she’s heard referred to as “movie theatre butter,” that’s water under the bridge.

What could be moments or even minutes pass, and when Eleanor begins to ease her grip, Tahani extricates herself as gently as she can, but keeps an arm around her shoulders. “Come on, then. Janet’s stocked this house with the loveliest tea, and I’ll be damned if you don’t try any of it. You can take the settee while I find us a kettle.”

**Author's Note:**

> lowkey I kind of hate this writing but I'm also aware that I haven't practiced in literal years so I'm proud of myself for trying even though I am Hardcore Judging Myself hh  
y'all I have such a long ass way to go before I can be Good At This  
self-improvement is hard and I think instead we should dedicate our energy to something better, like eating cake  
or frozen yogurt, which I unironically enjoy, @Janet
> 
> anyway I genuinely hope you have a good day, and Go Do Something Good™


End file.
